Hey Folks, the hysteria over the cost of the game is still going strong on Reddit and various other platforms. While I don’t think, that the battle pass itself is a major issue, I agree that the lack of transparency and the cost of the game in general is.
I’m personally fine with paying around 300€ a year for the game I love and spend more time on than Netflix and Spotify combined. But the many discussions got me thinking about different ways for blizzard to make money with Hearthstone. So here, for discussions sake, a economy system proposition.
A perfect economy would imo be, were F2P complete a set before the next expansions drops. People that spend money, get a head start that is larger or smaller, depending on the money invested. With 80€/$, you should definitely unlock 95% of an expansion right away. Extra resources, these players accumulate over the 3 following months, can be invested into cosmetics of all different sorts or content of older sets.
So far, so easy. But I guess the revenue for Blizzard would be to low since once you got a stock of Resources, you can get you head start for free every following expansion. My solution: Cards of the newest expansion aren’t purchasable with gold, nor are they craftable with dust from previous expansions. The newest expansion should have a completely separate economy. This obviously requires a VERY generous system that allows F2P players to accumulate a lot of cards on the first days-weeks. And as I said, at the end of an expansion everyone should have completed the set. This system would have a couple major advantages:
- F2P can keep up with the game (even though they miss out on the fun of week one - but that’s mostly the case already)
- The focus is brought back to “collectible” card game. You slowly complete your collection through the months and don’t just buy day 1 and start saving for the next expansion again.
- People don’t have the incentive to dust old and niche cards, that might become meta in the future or relevant in other game modes.
- People are more limited in what they can play. This one is bitter sweet, I know. But it could result in a much longer lasting variety and prevent the meta from settling down to quickly... on the cost of the first month being P2W. Witch is acceptable imo, since F2P should catch up rather quickly.
- New players can slowly catch up since they don’t need to collect cards of multiple sets simultaneously. After one year at most, they should be on par with everyone else.
- A separate economy for the newest set would allow blizzard to lower the price of older expansions by a lot since people can’t take advantage of that so easily and can’t convert purchased resources into new cards.
Tl;dr: Everyone gets a full collection over time but you have to pay to access the cards early on. The additional resources you accumulate over the course of an expansion can be invested into older expansions or cosmetics but not saved for future expansions.
Disclaimer: I haven’t taken the time to think this 100% through since I doubt it having any relevance. There are certainly some flaws with such a system that I didn’t think about. The current currencies would probably need a complete overhaul.
Do you think, such a system would hurt blizzards revenue?
